


Alone (But Not Lonely)

by blue_fjords



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-03
Updated: 2012-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-30 13:02:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_fjords/pseuds/blue_fjords
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five scenes from Tosh’s life, set pre-series one, with reference to “Fragments.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alone (But Not Lonely)

When Toshiko was a small child, she traveled to Japan with her parents to attend the funeral of her father’s father. She held tight to her mother’s hand as they hurried down the streets of Naha, meeting relatives here, tidying up the earthly affairs of her grandfather there. Her father’s cousins offered to let her stay with them and their families during these visits, but Tosh squeezed her mother’s hand harder, and she was allowed to go with her parents. She tripped along beside them, past coffee shops and tea houses, and store fronts boasting breads in fanciful animal designs or the latest selection of plastic toys: big eyed figurines with wide grins and pink hair facing off against multi-colored robots. She actively avoided the children of her father’s cousins, who made fun of the strange lispy way she pronounced Japanese and the British clothes she wore. Their world was just as alien to her, but she emulated her mother and did not let on her true feelings, sitting quietly in a corner and calculating the number of buttons on the clothing of everyone named Sato versus the buttons on everyone named Sasaki. The Sasakis used many more buttons. 

At the end of the week, her father announced a special reward for her good behavior. They would take a trip to Expo, and Emerald Beach. Expo was filled with rides and exhibits to entertain the young, but Tosh was most entranced by the dolphin show. The dolphins leapt through hoops, danced across the waves and sang. It was the singing that filled her eyes with tears. Her father took them for tears of joy and gave her a rare smile. Tosh didn’t have the words to explain how she felt; how it wasn’t right to keep the dolphins there – how the singing sounded like a desperate cry for help. She returned her father’s smile with a watery lop-sided little thing, satisfying him. 

Emerald Beach was a welcome respite with its warm water, white sand and waves as tall as buildings back home in London. She screamed in delight as she rode the waves, and for the first time in her life, ignored the admonitions of her parents to be careful. The adrenaline rush blossomed in her brain and sent tendrils of power down to her very tippy-toes. She could walk on water, she could swim for miles, she could free the dolphins and conquer her teasing cousins. An errant hibiscus flower appeared in the churning water beside her, just out of reach, and she surged forward, grasping her prize. Her mother’s face was white with fear when she surfaced, dripping, farther down the beach, and her father even raised his voice. But even as she hung her head in shame, Tosh was able to catch, just out of the corner of her eye, her mother’s slight smile as she smelled the hibiscus. 

***

Back in London, she disappeared again amongst the skyscrapers, just one more immigrant child in a city swarming with all of the peoples of the world. She started school, and suddenly new worlds beckoned. Maths. Maths spoke to her in a language she could understand, the numbers and codes falling into place and providing order, even as they invited her to explore and create. And when she craved more human interactions, she would close her bedroom door and open her books. Then her friends came out to play. She bent over an old, dusty tome with Bastian and felt the wind in her face as she rode Falkor high above Fantastica, dipping and wheeling and diving close enough to reach out and touch individual blades of grass. She loved the stories of the misfit loners, the unloved ones who, through strength of will and wit, persevered against all odds. She laughed with glee when Matilda got the family she deserved; wept in the attic with Sara Crewe; delighted in the wonder she shared with Lucy Pevensie; marveled at the strength and courage and resourcefulness of Karana; and found a true kindred spirit in Meg Murry. 

She barely noticed the lack of another’s hand in her own, the sharing of whispered confidences. She worked with her mother in their tiny garden instead. They grew only flowers, her mother’s one indulgence. The garden was not large enough to arrange the plants in a pattern of a tesseract, so she kept to strict rows and imagined them as brightly colored lines of information, like in _Tron_. If she squinted, she could see movement amongst the flowers, one equation leaping along the row of daffodils until it reached the end and hopped to the daisies, multiplying and becoming something else entirely. And she was the only one in the world who could follow it, and _know_ it.

***

When Tosh was fifteen, she got Julie Owens as a lab partner. Julie Owens was tall and athletic, with burnished copper curls just touching the tops of her shoulders, large hazel eyes and full breasts. She swore like a sailor whenever the teacher was out of earshot and had a way of directing her full attention at the person she was addressing. For the first three months of their partnership, Tosh was only able to squeak out a “yes,” “no” or “maybe we shouldn’t mix those two together.” She got used to the heat flaming in her cheeks whenever Julie asked her a question. She looked forward to the accidental brush of their fingers around test tubes, the weekends they were given large assignments and Julie asked her over to her house to work on them. She inwardly beamed with pleasure as she surveyed the test questions, the equations lining up as puzzle pieces in her head and flowing down along her arm and out of her pencil. Julie smiled at her and hugged her shoulders when she got the answers, and Tosh was able to ignore the Owens paterfamilias, hovering in the doorway and watching her in such a way that her skin crawled with the feeling of Different. 

She went to the Owens house only once when there were no adults present. It was after school, and Julie was tripping over a string of swears about their professor as they walked up the path to the front door. The sun was out that day, turning Julie’s hair to flames and picking out the gold sparks in her eyes. Tosh had been shooting her looks out of the corner of her eye all the way from school. But at the front door, Julie’s face fell as she realized she did not have her key, and it was her turn to start dinner. A shadow entered her eyes, a shadow Tosh knew without asking belonged to Julie’s grandfather, and she steeled her shoulders. She had never done it before, but she knew, looking at that lock, that she could figure out how to move the tumblers inside and open the door. She knelt, held out her hand for Julie’s hair clip and set to work. She had no tawny hair, no jock boyfriend, no speedy blue convertible, but she knew she didn’t need them to save Julie this time. The lock soon made a satisfying snick and the door swung open. Julie pressed her lips to hers, fleeting, grateful, already moving into the house, but Tosh stood outside, rooted to the spot, her heart fluttering madly in the confines of her body.

***

Tosh’s first flat was a walk-up over a sweet shop in Cambridge. The shop opened late and closed early, perfect for a young woman studying new technology day and night. When she needed a distraction during the day, she popped downstairs and wandered down the aisles of sweets. Her favorites were lollipops, brightly colored and imperfectly spherical. The shop owner gave her free samples of new sweets, and she wrote up carefully worded reactions to each one, including suggestions on the ratio of sugar to artificial flavors.

At night, she pored over her textbooks, and made corrections in the margins. She sat on her bed in her tiny flat, laptop propped on her knees, and dived into site after site, thoroughly acquainting herself with all the corners of the internet she hadn’t felt she could explore from her parents’ house. The laptop was unwieldy and too heavy, and she debated with herself for almost a week before taking it apart on her workbench/kitchen counter. The materials were unnecessarily heavy, she decided. She would have to do something about that in the future. She put it back together again, adding memory and changing the placement of a few things. The laptop ran more smoothly than before, and she moved onto reassembling and creating new machines from the Cambridge computer lab's discarded equipment. She opened her window as she worked in her flat, the accents of Cambridge's students contrasting with the voices of Cambridge's townspeople. She had one foot in either world as she hunched over her bench in her flat, and she blocked them both out, reaching for a tiny pick or another spool of wire.

***

She tossed and turned in her cell, fingers clawing around the edges of the stones, before rising to her feet and pacing its length. The high window didn't lead to the outside, of that she was sure, the light too cold, the silences too profound to be natural. She ran programs in her head to keep herself sane, coding the first game she had ever broken down to its original building blocks. Only this time the ghosts weren't ghosts, but soldiers in berets, and the maze led inexorably to her mother, fading from existence the closer she got to the end.

Every other day she left her cell to pace the inner courtyard, tied to her other prisoners in a mockery of exercise. She surreptitiously shot them glances in the half-light. Were they murderers and thieves? Or just people who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time? She gave them names: Euclid for the plump little man with the shell-shocked expression, Pythagoras for the tall bland man he always followed. Number Six was the brooding third man in line, and the heavily scarred woman she named Hypatia. She never once spoke to them, nor them to her. The stories she concocted for them provided a desperate distraction for the interminable stretches in her cell.

Sometimes she asked questions out loud in her cell, yelling up to her window. She had to keep moving, keep questioning. If she stopped, she would _stop_ , and that scared her most of all. What use would she be then? 

She was in the cell for three months. Her voice grew hoarse with disuse, her imagination stopped exploring, and she sat in the corner for longer and longer stretches of time, or curled herself into a ball in the middle of the floor. One day her door swung open to reveal the outline of a man in a glowing nimbus. Tosh flattened herself against the far wall, and peered across the cell at him. There was something she recognized about him and it wasn’t in his features. 

“Interesting place you got here. The décor’s a bit wanting.” He spoke with an American accent, the good cheer forced in amongst clipped vowels. Tosh said nothing back.

He cocked his head at her, his smile fading. “Come with me, Toshiko. The door’s open.”

He turned and left without a further word. Tosh blinked twice, suddenly alone again in her cell. She could hear his footsteps receding. She took a deep breath, pushed off from the wall, and followed him out to the courtyard. Her throat itched when she spoke. "Here I am."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my betas, misswinterhill and adjovi. The title comes from the song by Eliza Gilkyson. One final note on the setting: the town of Naha, Expo and Emerald Beach are all real places on the island of Okinawa in Japan. They may have changed drastically since then, but this is what they were like in the early 80s at the time Tosh would have been there.  
> Originally posted in August of 2009.


End file.
